I ordered my bathroom beadboard via Nantucket Beadboard (www.beadboard.com) and LOVE it...It wasn't the cheapest option I had but I wanted it to hold up to moisture. My neighbors bath paint started peeling and separating after just a couple of years. You can go with strip products or sheet products. I went with strip products. And if you do go with sheet product, make sure it is thick enough and has a way to butt against each other and overlap.....so you don't get the awful joints. Especially awful on a light painted finish. Here's the link and a photo of my bathroom. For the whole room, I think it was around $300-$400...but definitely worth the quality material! Kompy Here is a link that might be useful: Nantucket Beadboard

A vote for NO beadboard. Originally, bb was an early 1900s kind of thing - there's nothing remotely midcentury about it. Now its totally overused and usually in the form of DIY paneling from the big box store. Not that I think we have to be historical purists - just have all the design components relate well and complement each other. In my mind the country-ish flavor of bb doesn't relate well to the more suburban sophisticated style of your tile floor and of the typical 60s ranch house. Unless you've already reworked the rest of the house to be more traditionally styled and beadboard friendly - in that case just pls disregard! Agree that the sprayed on epoxy finish (in any color) can be a good affordable alternative to ripping out the tile and re-installing some other kind of wall. The tub will probably peel so maybe you could just replace that - the money and effort you save not ripping out the tile wall (believe me that is a beast of a job) can go to the cost of replacing the tub.

IMO you have to have the right style house for beadboard ceilings to succeed - you can't just chuck them up anywhere with any ol' kind of decor and architecture. Ditto for coffered ceilings, IMO. 3-dimensional ceiling treatments are tricky. (I've finally got DH really sold on tin ceilings for this house - steered him past a display of it at the home center and subtly made him think it was his idea LOL - but it'll have to wait until we find out if the downstairs ceilings have to come down to fix the "trampoline floors" upstairs. Bleh.) As long as it's never been painted, removing popcorn ceiling material is easy, if messy, so doing that part yourselves could save you some real money. Demo work always costs more than it seems like it ought to and it can be awfully therapeutic. ;-) Remove all the furniture from the room, cover the floors with waterproof disposable tarps (run them up the wall several inches and use wide painter's tape to secure them so water won't run under the baseboard, and tape the tarps together too) and turn the electricity off to the room and remove or cover light fixtures. If you have nice wallpaper or easily-damaged paint on the walls, tape plastic over the walls too. Even though it looks idiotic put on a shower cap, trust me on that, and oversized safety glasses. Get yourself a garden sprayer - the kind with the hose and canister - fill it with warm water, and wet the popcorn stuff down. Let it sit for a few minutes. Chances are some of it will start splatting on the floor all by itself but scrape gently at it with a wide scraper. You can even get scrapers that will screw onto a threaded wooden pole (like old-fashioned broomsticks), they're in the paint department at Lowes/HD, so you don't have to teeter on a stepstool or ladder. You may need to wet stubborn areas down more but you don't want to saturate the drywall. You may not be able to get every trace off but once the ceiling dries you can go over it quickly with a sanding screen on a pole sander and knock off any stubborn bits. Roll/fold up the tarp with the popcorn glop still on it for disposal; if there's a lot of water and you have a shop-vac available, by all means use that to suck up as much of the water as you can. All the supplies together would cost less than $100, maybe $150 if you needed a LOT of plastic (that's not counting a shop-vac, but that's not mandatory, and you might be able to mooch one off your contractor friend), once you get the hang of it it goes fast, and your contractor will have a nice clean surface all ready for skimcoating. If you're up to painting you could just have the contractor do the actual drywall-finishing work, saving you even more money. IMO if you put up beadboard or something on the ceiling I do think it would be best to remove the popcorn anyway in order to have a smooth surface to work with, but you can do a bit more mickey-mouse job of it. ;-) I think 8 foot ceilings are wonderful... my previous house had 7 foot ceilings (and slanted ones upstairs that went down to 3 feet high). In this house I'm blessed by ceilings a little over 8 1/2 feet (depending on where you measure LOL) downstairs and upstairs again those angled ones that go from 8 feet to 4 feet.

Thanks for your reply! The door is actually dark mahogany, by Pella. Door handle is the antique bronze, and the light fixtures are as well, but it’s a super dark bronze, almost looks black. Decorative lantern to be installed next week. Knowing that, do you still think black for a railing choice? My goal is for the railing to “disappear” to the eye, vs being an eye catcher. Especially for the stairs coming down to the ground level. See up close pictures of the door without the shadows, making it look black, and the lantern that is on the way!